The present invention relates to a process for the utilisation of fish waste, more particularly to the recovery of the sawdust resulting from sawing large frozen fish blocks into smaller pieces and its reincorporation onto the frozen cut pieces.
In the production of frozen fish products such as fish fingers or fish portions the fish, as soon as possible after being caught, is gutted, filleted into large pieces which are combined into blocks and the blocks themselves are immediately deep frozen. The frozen blocks, which are very hard, are later sawn into smaller pieces, for instance, by band saws or circular saws and this causes the formation of sawdust, the amount obtained being dependent on the original block size and the dimension of the final product. If this sawdust is wasted, the economy of the process is reduced and thus it is desirable to utilise as much of this high quality material as possible. It has been proposed to recover this sawdust and convert it into other products, such as patties, fillets or pieces for frying as described in British Patent No. 1,157,517, or fish croquettes as described in French Patent No. 2.180.447. However, it would be most expedient if this sawdust were reincorporated on to the cut pieces of frozen fish. Previous attempts have only succeeded in reincorporating about 50% of the saw dust on the cut pieces of frozen fish and the sawdust was not distributed evenly on the fish pieces.